Creating Characters With Blender - Part 2

1. What is Rigging: In the next lessons, we will create an animation skeleton for a character. This animation skeleton, also known as Rig, is what allows us to move the character in a controlled manner. The rig for a character like this is usually created using an object in the armature category. This object has a series of components called bones, which influence the corresponding parts of the character allowing controlled deformation when positioned in the model. In addition, the character's armature object is often configured with structures we call animation controls. Animation controls are the components we select and manipulate to position the characters as desired. This stage of the production where a character rig is created is called rigging. The problem is that this stage is one of the most complex and time consuming in production and is usually handled by specialized professionals. Fortunately, there are some tools that allow us to create animation rigs using automated solutions. What I will do is the following. To provide you with a basic understanding of the process. In this section, I will introduce some tools and fundamental concepts necessary for creation. After that, I will introduce an Adn called Rig Phi, which will enable us to create a complex body rig for the character quickly and easily. Finally, we will see how to set up the influence the rig bones will have on the character's body through a process called weight paint. Thank you for watching and I see you next time. 2. Vertex Groups: In this lesson, I'm going to present a property of geometries called vertex groups. To demonstrate how vertex group work, I can use the default cube from Blender's initial scene. I will enter the edit mode of the object. I will move the top face of the object upwards to make it longer. Now I will use the control shortcuts of the loop cut two to insert new loops. In this direction of the model, I will rotate the mouse scroll to insert approximately 15 segments. Now that I have a reasonable amount of vert, I will activate the Object Data tab in the Properties editor. Here we will find a panel called Vertex Groups. If I click on this button with the plus sign, I can create a new vertex group. If I double click on the group's name, I can rename it. I will name this group First Group. Now I will create a second group. I will rename it to Second group. If I want, I can create practically as many groups as I want. If I want to delete a group, I just need to have it active in this list. And click on this button with the minus sign. Now let's see how to associate the virtues of the model. With each group, I will activate the x ray mode of the viewport. I will select a group of virtues at the top of the model. Now to associate the vertes with a group, I just need to have this group active in the list. And click the assigned button here at the bottom of the panel. If you ever want to exclude a set of verses from the group, just select them and click the remove button. If you click the selected button, it will select all the verts of the active group. If you click select, it will remove all the vertes of the group from the selection. Now just to finish the demonstration, I will select another group of vertes. At the bottom of the model, I will activate the other vertex group. I will associate the virtues with this group, but this time before clicking the assigned button, I will change this weight parameter. I will type 0.5 when we click the assigned button, and this value is at maximum. That is with a value of one. The verts are entirely associated with the active group, but when we use a smaller value, the verts are only partially influenced by the group in question. In this case, if I click the assigned button with the weight parameter at 0.5 the verts will be only 50% influenced by this group. Now I will exit the edit mode and deactivate the x ray mode to show one of the applications of vertex groups. I will go to the modifier tab of the properties editor. I will add the simple deform modifier. This modifier can deform the object using one of these operations. Twist, bend, paper or stretch. In this case, I will leave the twist option enabled, but I will change the x of the operation to the z axis. This way, when I adjust the angle parameter, the object will be twisted along this axis. Up to this point, we are not seeing anything extraordinary. This is just the way a simple modifier can work. However, some modifiers can have their effect restricted to a specific vertex group configured on the model. If we open the restriction subpanel, we can see a field called vertex group. If we click on this field, we can see all the groups you created for the object. If I choose a group to which I have associated a certain set of verts, only the verts from that group will be affected by the modifier. In the case of the first group, we can see that these verts are being 100% affected by the modifier. If I change the defining the group here to the second group, we will see that only these verts are now affected by the modifier. But here we have another interesting factor. Since I assigned a weight of 0.5 to the vertes in relation to this vertex group, we can see that demodifier is acting at only 50% of the configured intensity. Vertex groups are just a way for geometry to save a specific selection of verses. The selections can have a partial weights associated with the vertex group if we want. Vertex groups can be used in various functions of blender with different objectives. For our purposes, we will see that the vertex groups will be essential for configuring the influence that the bones of the skeleton will have on the character. That's it for this lesson. Thank you for watching and see you next time. 3. Introduction to Armatures: In this lesson, I will give you a brief demonstration of how the beginning of the manual creation process of the animation skeleton works. But before creating the animation skeleton itself, I will create a geometry that will be influenced by this skeleton. Since I only want to do a simple demonstration, I will transform this initial cube from the blender default sin into a small cylindrical structure like a sausage. After selecting the cube, I will enter edit mode. I will scale the geometry on the y axis so that it has roughly disproportion around five times the size of the original object. Now I will use the control R shortcut of the loop, cut two to insert five segments in the longitudinal direction. After that I can go back to object mode. Now I will go to the modifier stab in the properties jitter. I will add the subdivision surface modifier to the object. Afterwards, I will click the applied commands in the modifiers menu to effectively incorporate the subdivisions into the model. Now we can create the armature object. To this, I will use the Shift DA shortcut to open the Creation menu, I will click on the Armature object. This will create a skeleton with one bone in the sing. To visualize the object, I will temporarily disable the visualization of the geometry we created in the outer liner. This structure we are seeing is a bone which is the smallest part of an animation skeleton. If we look at the objects interaction mode menu, we will see that it has three options. The object mode, which is the default mode. The edit mode, where the skeleton shape is configured. The pose mode, which is the interaction mode we use to animate the skeleton. To start editing the skeleton, we can activate the edit mode. Now I will activate the lateral view of the tridiviw by clicking on the X, on the navigation icon. I will make sure I am in the orthography mode of the tridiviw. By clicking this button with the edit mode active, we can see that it's possible to select and manipulate the different parts of a bone. The central part, which is the actual bone, this is spheres at the ends. One of them is called the head and the other is called the tail. When we reposition these spheres, we are automatically adjusting the shape of the actual bone. Now I will activate the visualization of the geometry created again in the sensual liner. In this way, we can start adjusting the skeleton according to the object. What we will do is position the first bony joints at the end of the geometry. I will position the other joints at a distance of approximately one third of the size of the geometry. In addition to being able to manipulate these three spheres, we can extrude the bone. To do this, just have one of these spheres selected and press the shortcut key. When we extrude a joint, we create another bone for the skeleton. I will position this joint of this new bone in the middle of the space between the previous joint and the end of the object. To finish, I will press the key again to extrude one more bone. I will position this bone at the end of the geometry. These are the basic procedures for creating an animation skeleton. After creating the animation skeleton, we can enter pose mode in the interaction modes menu to animate the skeleton. Here we could select any of the bones and rotate with the R shortcut key. The problem is that in the, the geometry isn't yet configured to follow the movement we make with the skeleton, I will use the control shortcut to undo the positioning of the bones. I will go back to object mode of the skeleton now. Let's save this file. In the next lesson, we will continue with this sing to see how to configure the geometry to follow the movement we make in the animation skeleton. Thank you for watching and I see you next time. 4. Weight Paint Part 1: In this lesson, we will begin to see how to set up a geometry to follow an animation skeleton. The way a geometry knows which vertes should follow each bone is through vertex groups. We will configure the vertex groups of the geometry so that each individual vertex group follows a specific bone of the skeleton. We could do this configuration manually, we saw in the lesson on vertex groups. But there are more practical ways to set up these groups when we want to configure them to be influenced by an animation skeleton. In this lesson, I will start to show the method I consider the most objective for the set up. The first thing we will do is select the geometry that will be influenced by the skeleton. Next, while holding down the Shift key, I will add the skeleton to the selection. Now I will go to the Object menu Parent. I will click on the Armature Deform with empty groups option. Note that in this menu, there is also an interesting option called Armature Deform with Automatic weights. This option will indeed do part of the work automatically. But before I present this option, I want you to understand how to configure the weights manually. Let's start by using the empty groups option. Now I will select only the geometry to see what this procedure has done. If we look at the modifier step in the properties ejector, we will see that this procedure added a modifier called armature to the object. This modifier informs the object that it should be deformed according to a certain skeleton in the scene. Since we use the parent with empty groups command, the modifier has already been automatically configured to use the armature object that was selected. Furthermore, if we click on the object data tab of the properties editor, we will see that the command has automatically created some vertex groups with this procedure. These vertex groups are already created according to the name of each bone that will influence the deformation of the object. However, the procedure we used create these vertex groups, but does not assign any virtues of the model to each of them. The process we are going to learn now is called weight paint. This process is a practical and visual way for us to assign influence values of each vertex group to the vertex we want on the model. The way I consider the most practical to work with the weight paint process is as follows. We first will select the skeleton, then with the shift key pressed, we will add the geometry to the skeleton. This way, the geometry is the activity object, but the skeleton is also in the selection. With the selection, we can go to the interactions mode menu and enable the weight paint option. The interaction mode menu can also be opened with the control tab shortcut. With the shortcut, we can open the menu in this floating form and choose an interaction mode for a geometry. The weight paint mode allows us to select the vertex groups and use painting tools to paint the influence on the models verts. To activate the vertex group to be painted at a given moment, we could click on the name of the respective vertex group in the object data tab. However, when we make the selection the way we did where the armature is also selected, we can directly select the bones in the tridivial. In this case, it's good to check if we have the x ray mode active. To make the selection, we simply hold the out key and click on the bone. If you are using Blender version four or later if you are using a version prior to version four, you should hold the control key and click on the bone when we select a bone in this way, the corresponding vertex group is automatically activated in the geometry. If we have a vertex group active and use the weight paint tools, we will assign weight values to the vertes we are painting for the vertex group that is active. To start, I will leave the first bone of the skeleton selected. With that, we can see that the first vertex group is active in the geometry. Now before I show the weight paint tools, I will show you some settings that I recommend you do whenever you use the weight paint mode. First, check if the painting mask buttons are disabled for both faces and verts. If any of these buttons are active, the painting tools will only work for verts or faces that are selected in the edited mode. In general, it's good to leave these buttons disabled. Next, enable the mesh symmetry button for the x axis whenever your model is symmetric. This way everything you set up for one side of the model will be automatically mirrored to the other side. Finally, open the options menu and enable the autonormalized function. This function will prevent the sum of the values of different vertex group on a specific vertex from exceeding 100% In practice, this will prevent a series of problem during the painting process. So just trust me and enable function. With these three settings, we can start setting up the weight paint, but to keep this video from getting too long, I will continue in the next lesson. Thank you for watching and I see you next time. 5. Weight Paint Part 2: In this lesson, we will continue to see how to use the weight painting mode to configure the influence of vertex groups on the virtues of the model. Now that we have configured some basic properties of the weight painting mode, let's take a look at the weight painting tool. As you can see, the weight painting mode has a series of tools in the tool bar. But to be direct and concise, we will only need the draw two and the blur two. The draw two is the tool we will use to paint the weight on the verses. Here in the brush configuration bar, we can see the weight value which corresponds to the weight that will be assigned to the vertes when we brush over the geometry. The radius, which defines the brush size, The strength parameter, which defines the tensed with which the configured value will be added each time we brush over the model. Initially, we will leave the weight parameter with a value of one when we want to add weight from a vertex group to a region, or zero when we want to remove a value from a region. We will adjust the intent with which we will add values to the verts through the strength parameter. The brush radius can be freely configured according to the situation. If we have the brush to active and the cursor over the view port, we can press the shorted key and move the cursor out and in to adjust the brush size. Now I will rotate the viewport to see the scene from above. I will make sure the first bone is selected by clicking on it with the out key pressed. If you are using a version of blender earlier than version four, you should click on the bones with the control key pressed to make the selection. Now I will brush over one side of the region near the first bone. As you can see, as I brush over the model, this red coloration appears on the verts. In addition, we can see some other colors appearing on the model. These colors indicate how much infants the active vertex group has on the vertes in question. Red means the vertex is fully influenced by the vertex group. Dark blue means the vertex in question is not influenced by the vertex group at all. Green means the vertex group has an influence of approximately 50% on the vertex in question, and the other colors indicate intermediate values according to this chart. Since the mesh symmetry option is active, we can see that what I paint on one side is automatically painted on the other side. But if I rotate the viewport and look under the model, we will see that the painting does not go through the geometry. If we want the painting to go through the geometry, we need to go to the brush panel. We will disable the front faces only option, but that alone will not be sufficient for most situations. In addition, we go to the fall off panel. We will change the fall off shape setting from sphere to projected. Now if I brush on one side, the back of the geometry will also be painted. I will brush over the model to paint all these verses around the first bone of the skeleton when we make the selection. As we did having the skeleton and the geometry in the selection, besides being able to select the bones to activate the vertex groups, we can also rotate the selected bones. If I press the R key, I can rotate the bone and see it acting on the model. This procedure is good to test the infants at the moment. After doing a test like this, we can use the control Z shortcut to revert the bone to its initial rotation. Now I will select the next bone of the skeleton by clicking on it with the out or control key pressed. I will use the draw two to paint the vertes around this bone. To finish, I will select the last bone. I will paint the verses around it. With the draw to now, I can select the bones and rotate using the R key to see how the weight paint is coming along. If we rotate the bones and see verses staying in place like this, it means these verses are not influenced by any vertex group. In this type of situation, we should select the bone that should be influencing these verses and use the draw to brush over the verses in question. During this testing process, we should rotate the bones reasonably to see if the deformations are good. Generally, the regions that are challenging to adjust are the joints. To better visualize the vertes during the weight painting process, we can go to the Overlays menu and enable the wire frame display. Now let's see how we can make the deformation in the joint region a bit smoother. I usually like to start smoothing the joint region using the blurred to just have a bone that affects the joint in question active. And start brushing with this two over the virtues of the joints. These will distribute the weights of the different vertex group more gradually among the virtues in the region. In this situation, we can also select the vertex group on the other side of the joint in question, we can also brush using the blurred tool. Now I will also use the blur tool to smooth the transition between the vertex group on the other joint. I will also smooth the transition with the other selected vertex group. When we use this procedure, we may conclude that a particular vertex group ended up with little influence over a specific origin. If we want to increase the influence of the vertex group again on the verts, we can activate the draw two again. We can paint again over the region. But if we want to paint in a more controlled manner, we can increase the intensity of the strength parameter a bit. Leave the weight parameter at the maximum value, but use a lower value in the strength parameter when you want to add value gradually. Now we can select each vertex group and brush in the areas where we think they should have more inference. These are the Bask procedures we can use to adjust the weight painting manually on the model. Now to finish, I will present the parent with automatic weight option. But first I will show you how to undo this weight paint configuration. With the firstly, we need to select all bones of the skeleton with the key and use the out R shortcut. This shortcut resets the rotation of all selected bones. And now I can go back to the object mode of the object. Now let's see how to remove the weight paint configuration we did for this with the geometry selected, we will open the options menu of the vertex group panel. By clicking on this arrow, we will delete all groups option. This will delete all vertex groups from the model. To finish, we can go to the modifier step of the properties ejector. We can delete the armature modifier. With this, we undo all the infants configuration we had done. Now I will select the geometry first. Then with the shift key pressed, I will add the skeleton to the selection. I will go to the Object menu Parent. I will click on the Armature Deform with automatic weights option. If we select the geometry and look in the modifiers tab, we will see that this procedure also adds the armature modifier to the object. Additionally, in the object data tab, the corresponding vertex groups for each bone are also created automatically. The difference is that this procedure does a weight paint configuration automatically taking into account the proximity of the verts to each bone. If I select the skeleton first, add the geometry to the selection and enter weight paint mode. We can select the bones and rotate to see how this automatic influence turned out. The weight configuration made by the parent with automatic weight command works very well in many situations. But it's also common to find some imperfections in the deformation when testing the joints. In that case, we just need to use the tools of the weight painting mode that we saw to make the necessary adjustments, especially in the joints of the model. This was a brief presentation of the weight configuration tools for the vertex groups. Thank you for watching and until next time. 6. Introduction to the Rigify Addon: In this lesson, we will see how we can create a complete rig for a character in a practically and automated way. To do this, we will enable an addon that is already installed in Blender called Giphy. To do this, we just need to click on the Edit Preferences and click the sections of the Preferences window. Now just start typing Rig in the search section, so the rigid will appear in the search, just enable it here and it will be available in Blender. If we open the ado pen or here the preferences window, we will see some information about the adom, this documentation button. If we click on it, the Rigifhi documentation page will open in your browser. This page has various information that can be useful if you want to delve a little deeper into Rigifhi. If we go back to Blender and close the preferences window, we can start using Rigifhi. I will select and delete the initial objects in the scene. That we will open the creation menu with the Shift, a shortcut. When we open the Creation menu, we can see that where there was only the armature option before. Now a sub menu opens with the single bony option. Blender creates a single bone just like it did before. We enable the addon. Now I will reposition the predcursor with the shift in the right mouse button to create other options in different places. Opening the Creation menu once again, I will now create this human meta option. As we can see with this option, Blender creates a complete humanoid looking skeleton. This is the skeleton we will use to create the animation skeleton for our character. But if you go back to the Creation menu, we will see that besides this option, we will still find a sub menu with various preconfigured skeleton options for animals like bird, which creates a bird, skeleton cat, which creates a filing skeleton horse which creates a horse skeleton. Shark which creates a shark skeleton. And wolf, which creates a nine shape of the skeleton. Additionally, we have another sub menu with some more basic skeleton options for humanoids and quadrupeds, which come without fingers and facial controls. All these skeletons can be adjusted in editing mode so that the size matches that of a character with that structure. This initial rigify skeleton we create at the beginning of the process is not the final skeleton that will be used for animation. It's just a skeleton we use to indicate to the final skeleton what the characters proportions are. If we look in the Outliner, we will see that the name of this initial rigify skeleton is called Meta rig. After the meta rig is adjusted, we can use the command for rigify to automatically create all the final animation controls with the configured proportions. To demonstrate this process, I will delete all these skeletons that I created. I will press shift C to position the predecursor in the center of the scene. Later on, we will see that initially it's quite important for the skeleton to be created in the center of the scene. Make sure to use the shift C shortcut before creating the skeleton. Now I will create a human meta G. Now to generate the animation controls, we must have the meta rig selected. In object mode, we must enable the Armature object Data tab in the properties Djitor with this person icon in the rigifi buttons panel. We will click on this Generate rig button. This process may take a while. When the process is complete, we will see that several lines have been created around the skeleton. These lines constitute the rig with the final controls we will use for animation. If we look in the outliner now, we will see this new object which is called Rig. Besides it, we see the meta rig, which is the skeleton we used previously to scale this skeleton and a collection that is already disabled. These collections hold some objects that are used so that the controls of the final rig have the shapes of this line. As we see this collection and the meta rig can be hidden as from the moment the final rig is generated. We will only use this object to animate the character. In the next lessons, we will see how to use rigiphi to create the animation skeleton for our projects. Thank you for watching until next time. 7. Checklist for the Rig Creation: In this lesson, we will begin preparing the scene to set up the animation skeleton for our character. Before we start this process, let's check if the scene is on the most appropriate form for everything to work correctly. If you have done everything exactly the way I have so far, your scene is likely already in the state it needs to be and you won't need to make any adjustments. However, if you have done something different regarding the topics I will show now, you may need to make some adjustments for everything to work correctly. For this lesson, I will use a file where I intentionally left some configuration issues for us to solve. Let's do the checks. Firstly, check if your character is oriented correctly in relation to the scene. This means having the models front facing the front of the scene. This is important because the direction in which the animation skeleton is created take into account the scene orientation. It is possible to adjust the skeleton for characters with different orientations, but everything works easier if the character is already in the correct orientation and position. If we pay attention to the navigation icon of the scene, we can see the three arcchtagonal axes, x, y, and z. Each axis has two circles, one of them has a letter corresponding to the axis, and the other circle has the color of the axis, but does not show the latter unless we hover the cursor over it. The front of the scene is the side corresponding to the y axis circle without the y letter. This means that for an object to face the front of the scene, it must be pointed in this direction. If your character is facing a different direction, it's best to correct this. Now you can do this by pressing the A key to select all the objects to ensure the rotation occurs. From the center of the sing, press the shift C shortcuts to position the predecursor exactly in the center of the thing. Go to the Transform Pval Point menu and choose the predecursor option. Since the predecursor is at the center of the sing, this, we will ensure that the rotation is done from this point. Now press the R key and then the Z key to rotate the character on the Z axis. Now just start rotating while holding down the control key pressed so that the rotation is done at precise intervals of five degrees. Now just rotate the object to the front of the scene. Observing the rotation value in this part of the interface, probably the value that will make your model face forward will be a multiple of 90 degrees, like 9,180 or 270. Afterwards, remember to go back to the transformer piv of point menu and re enable the median point option. The next step is to check if the characters objects are perfectly positioned at the center of the x axis of the scene. Remember that the red axis is the axis represented in red, which is the axis towards which the sides of the characters should be pointing. To check if the objects are at the center of this axis, just select each of them individually. Open the side bar in the item tab. Check the x value of the location parameter for the object to be at the center of the scene. This value should be zero. If it isn't simply zero, this value. Do this check for each of the objects in the scene. The positioning of the objects on the Y axis and the Z X is not as important as the positioning on the X Xs. But generally, I like to position the character roughly in the center of the scene, on the Y axis. I like to have the character soles on the baseline of the Sens grid on the Z axis. As I mentioned earlier at the beginning of the lesson, if you precisely followed my steps to create your model, it probably didn't have any of these issues. But if you missed something and your file has any of these issues, just use these procedures to make the corrections. With this, your file is now ready to start the rig creation process. That's it for this lesson. Thank you for watching and until next time. 8. Creating the Metarig: In this lesson, we will create the meta rig, which is the skeleton we used to instruct the rigifile where the characters animation controls should be created. To do this, you will open your characters file performing the checks I showed you in the previous lessons. Now the first thing we can do is create a separate collection for the rig so that we can keep the outliner organized. I had already created a collection just for the character in a previous lesson. If you haven't done it yet, I recommend you do it. This is not mandatory, but it helps keep the outliner cleaner. If you have a collection that you are not using, you can also delete it, just selected, and press the delete key. Since we are no longer using the characters references, you can hide or even delete that collection. Now we can create a collection exclusively for the rig by right clicking in the out liner and selecting new collection. After that, we can rename this collection to Rig. Now we can create a skeleton. Make sure the rig collection is active, because when we create an object, it is created in the active collection. Before creating the skeleton, I will use the shift C shortcut. This will place the tredcursor in the center of the treaty view with the. When we create the skeleton, it will be created exactly at this point. Now we can use the Shift D, a shortcut to open the Creation menu Armature. We can click on the Human Meta Ig option. This will create the skeleton at the center of the scene. The next step is to make an initial adjustment to the size and position of this skeleton. This adjustment can be done in two ways, in object mode or edited mode. If we change the size and position of this initial skeleton in object mode, we will have to make an adjustment before generating the final skeleton. To illustrate, I will make sure I am in object mode. I will move this skeleton forward a bit and scale it a bit by pressing the key. Now let's see what happens if I go to the object data tab in the properties editor and click the generate rig button. As we can see, the animation controls were generated ignoring the position and size adjustments I made in object mode. This happens because these transformations were not applied to the skeleton. To demonstrate how we can fix this, I will press control Z to undo this step of skeleton creation. And now before generating the animation skeleton, I will go to the object menu, apply all transforms. This will incorporate all the transformations I made in object mode into the skeleton. If I press the generator Gi button now we will see that the animation controls will be created, taking into account the transformations made in object mode. Now I will press control Z once again to undo the creation of the controls. I will delete this skeleton so that I can start fresh. I will create a new human meta rig in the creation menu. Now I will show you how I like to make the initial size adjustments of the skeleton, which is through the add mode. After creating the skeleton, we enter edit mode. We select all the bones with the key we will be able to move and scale the skeleton in edit mode. The difference is that when we make these transformations in edit mode, we don't need to worry up about supplying the transformations before generating the controls. We can move and scale these bones. When we create the controls, they will take into account all the transformations we made. Therefore, I recommend that after creating the meta rig, you don't make any changes in object mode, only in It modes to start transforming the skeleton and see how it fits inside the character. Let's activate the x ray mode here in the top bar. And to scale the skeleton from the center of the scene. Let's use the Shift C shortcut to ensure that the predcursor is at the center of the grid. Go to the transformed pivot points menu and select the Tredcursor option. With this, when we press the key, the skeleton will be scaled from the predcursor. As we can see, there is no size that makes the skeleton fit perfectly into the character. I will scale it so that the height of the skeleton's shoulders roughly matches the height of the character's arms. To ensure that all the bones have the correct size and positioning, we will need to adjust each one manually. The initial positioning is the same. I won't move the skeleton on the X axis because the character is already correctly positioned in the center of the green as is the skeleton. But if I want, I can make a small adjustment to the skeleton position on the Y axis just to make the manual adjustments work easier later. Now, before we proceed with the manual adjustments of each of the skeleton bones, I will hide the collection that contains the character geometries here in the outliner. If we look at the skeleton now, we will see that it has a series of bones that create a humanoid figure. All these bones we are seeing can be used for some types of characters, but in the case of our character, we are not going to use these facial bones. This rigififacial rig is a bit tricky to adjust and I am not so satisfied with the result. In a future lesson, I will show a different way to create the facial rig. Additionally, since our character has only four fingers on the hands, we can delete the bones for one of the fingers. It's important to note that most of the bones in the skeleton cannot be deleted because doing so we'll simply break the generation of the animation controls. It's crucial that you only delete the bones. I indicate to delete a bone from the skeleton, we need to be in edit mode. Then we can select the bones we want to delete and press the delete key. Let's start by excluding all the bones of the face, but without excluding the bones of the neck and the head bone. A safe way to do this is as follows. Ensure that x ray is active. With this, we will see a small bone inside the head bone. If we activate the bony property, stab in the property adjitor, we can see the name of each selected bone. When we select a bone in the skeleton, we can see its name in this field, in the panel. If we select the larger bone which corresponds to the head, we will see that its name is Spine 006. We can't delete this bone or the neck bones. What we need to do is delete smaller bone inside the head called face. Additionally, we should delete all the face bones linked to it. A safe way to do this is to select only the face bone. Make sure there are no other bones selected. Then go to the Select menu. Similar children, this command will select all the bones linked to the selected bone. Then we can press the delete key to the delete all of them. To finish, we can select these four bones correspond to the pinky finger of one hand and delete them. We can repeat this procedure on the other side, selecting the four bones of the pink finger on the other hand and deleting them. These are the bones that should be deleted to ensure everything works correctly. It's important not to delete any other bones from the initial skeleton. Now that we have only the relevant bones in the scene, we can unhide the collection with the characters geometries. With that, we can start adjusting each of the bones manually in each part of the body. But to keep this video from getting too long, we will do that in the next lesson. That's it for this lesson. Thank you for watching, and I see you next time. 9. Adjusting the Metarig Proportions Part 1: In this lesson, we will begin adjusting the bones of the meta rig we created in the previous class to fit our characters proportions. But before we do that, I recommend you check if you haven't deleted any bones that shouldn't have been deleted in the previous class. To do this, we can be either object mode or edited mode of the meta rig skeleton. To test if the bone structure is correct, we can go to the object data tab of the properties editor. We can click on the Generate Riggibton within the rig Fi panel. This is the button we will use to generate the final rig skeleton with the definitive controls. If you deleted only the bones I mentioned in the previous class, these animation controls should be generated correctly. That means the command will also work after the adjustments we will make in this class in case you don't delete any more bones. The issue is if you deleted a bone that is necessary for those controls to be created, you will see a narrower message at this moment. If that happens, it's better to go back to object mode, delete the entire skeleton, and start the process again. Since what we have done so far was a quick process, this won't take much time. Since adjusting the bones to the character can be a bit laborious. It's better to start this process only when you are sure your rig will work. In the end, once this test rig has been created correctly, you can use the control Z shortcut to undo the command. Now we can start adjusting the skeleton to the character's body comfortably. But before we start working on the proportions of the skeleton, I will make a few more adjustments to the scene. For that, I will switch the skeleton back to object mode, since in the previous class I had set the transform pivot point option to the tridcerus mode. I would change the setting to the median point mode, which is the default setting. To adjust this caton to the character's body, I can leave only the model's body visible in the viewport. This will simplify the visualization. During the process, I can go to the outliner and hide all the character geometries except the body. Now I will make one more adjustment that is not necessarily mandatory, but can simplify. Some step of the rig set up, I will join the body object to the head object. But before doing that, it's important to apply the mirror modifier to each of these objects. With the head object selected, I will go to the modifier tab. I will click on this mirror modifier arrow. I will click the applied command to apply the modifier changes to the object. Only the mirror modifier needs to be applied, so we can leave the odd modifiers as they are. Now I will select the body. I will also apply the mirror modifier. Now I will select the character's body. Holding down the shift key, I will add the head to the selection. With this selection, I will go to the Object menu and click on the Joint command. Now to effectively start adjusting the meta skeleton size, I can activate the x ray mode. I can select the skeleton and enter the edited mode so that we can adjust the bones on only half of the skeleton. We can activate the x, x mirror function by clicking on this button in the two settings bar. If this bar is not appearing in your interface, go to the view menu and activate the two settings option with this button active. Everything we do on one side of the meta rig will be mirrored to the other side. If you want to act as a guide on how the meta rig bone should be positioned within a humanoid character, you can go to the edit menu Preferences in the Add section. You can type rig in the search field. With this, you will easily find the rig pia dome in the list. If you expand the interface by clicking on the arrow next to the add ons name, you will find a documentation button. If we click on this button, we will be taking to the rigifying manual online. Here we can click on the bony positioning guide link. On this page, you will find various information that can help you position the bones of the character. This first part is about positioning the bones of the face, which we won't use. But if you scroll down a bit, we will find the guide on how to position the dorsal bones. I particularly like to start with the positioning of the bones. Hearing blender, we can close the preferences window to ensure that the arms don't interfere with the positioning of the torsal bones. I will start by selecting them that will press the H key to hide these bones temporarily. Now I can activate the side view and make sure I am in orthography mode by clicking this button. Now if we consult the bony positioning guide, we will see that the spine bone should go more or less through the center of the model. The top of the head bone should be at the top. The base should be in the middle of the top of the neck. The top neck bone should go from the middle of the neck to the base of the head. The bottom neck bone should go from the base of the neck to the middle. The trunk bone should be all positioned more or less in the middle of the torso. Here at the bottom, I need to select the base of the spine with a selection window so that I can do this without accidentally selecting the leg. Will select the leg bones. I will also press the H key to hide them temporarily. Now I can create a selection window to select the tip of these bones. I can drag it to the middle of the base of the character's torso. Now I can adjust the distribution of the bones in the middle of the torso following the instructions from the Gi Fi bone positioning guide. Now I can activate the front view and adjust the position of this outer tip of the pelvis bone. The inner part of the clevical bone should be in the center of the upper chest. The outer part should be near the top of the shoulders. This other bone assists in the skeleton Z inference configuration process and can be positioned more or less like this. With that, we finish the positioning of the torso bones. It's very important that all these bones are fully centered in the middle of the model. If by chance you move one of these bony ones out of the X X center of your sin, you must make sure to correct the disposition to center the bones. Again, you should open the side bar by clicking on this arrow. Here you will find the coordinates of each joint of the selected bone. The value of the X axis in the head field, we will adjust the position of one of the bones joints. The value of the X axis in the tail field, we will adjust the position of the other joint of the bone. If you accidentally move a spine bone out of the center, you should zero the value of the X axis in these two fields. However, when we move a bonus position like this, the bones rotation may become misaligned. To fix this, we can zero the row parameter of the respective bone. Just type zero in this parameter. Three, straighten the bone again. If you'll notice that another spine bone is the stumes aligned, You can also select the bone and zero the row parameter. Now that the torsal bones are correctly positioned, I will use the out H shortcut to unhide all the bones I had hidden earlier. Now I can work on positioning the character's legs. For this, I will create a selection window to select all the bones of the leg. I will move them on the X axis so that the bones pass exactly through the center of the leg. Notice how I am moving all the bones at once, keeping the structure completely stretch along this axis. Now I can take this joint at the top of the leg and move it downward, pressing the G key to start moving and the Z key to restrict the movement to this axis. Now I can activate the side view. I can start working on the positioning in this view. Remember that we can always consult the positioning guide of the rigifi itself. As you can see, this joint should align with the ankle of the model. This joint should be more or less in the middle of the foot. This joint, at the tip, should be positioned at the front tip of the foot. This back bone should be positioned at the heel of the foot. The knee joint should be positioned at the character's knee height. But it's very important that it's aligned more forward, not in the middle of the leg. It's extremely important for the rig to function that there is a small angle between the tight bone and the calf bone of the leg. This angle will tell the rig in which direction the leg should bend. When we move the character's controls, we should leave a small angle in this direction between these bones, instead of keeping them completely straight or at an angle in another direction. In practice, you should make sure that the knee joint bone is a little forward from an imaginary line. That should try to visualize between the top leg joint and the ankle joint. This way, everything will work as it should. And with that, we finish positioning the bones of the head, torso, and legs. In the next class, we will work on the positioning of the arms and hands. Thank you for watching, and I see you in the next class. P 10. Adjusting the Metarig Proportions Part 2: In this class, we are going to position the arm and hand bond for the character. I particularly like to start by making an approximate positioning of the hand bones. I will select all the bones of one hand. With a selection window. I will set the report to the orthography, front view. I will make sure I have the transformed pivot point configured with the median point option. Now I will move these bones with the key. I will rotate them with the key. I can also use the top view to make these adjustments. I can use the key to scale these bones. To position the elbow, I will select the joint in the middle of the arm. I will move it to the middle of the character's arm, but to help in this process and also in position in the finger joints, I will show you what trick up here in the interface. I will activate this nap function by clicking on this button with the padlock icon. I will set this nap to volume mode. Opening this menu next to the padlock. This will cause when we move a certain element onto a geometry, it will be positioned at the center of the volume of that geometry. But for this setting to work with each individual selected joint of the bones, we need to activate the active option down here in the menu. Now if I move the selected joints to the arms volume, the vertical and horizontal position will follow the movement I am making. But in the Thrid environment depth, the joint will be positioned in the middle of the volume I am clicking on this greatly simplifies the positioning of some skeleton joints. I will position these three arm joints considering the shoulder, elbow, and wrist positions according to the rigify guide. Now let's position the finger bones. As we can see, each finger has four bones. The first one should be positioned inside the hand, and the other three correspond to each of the finger phalanges. The first joint of the hand bone can be positioned near the wrist like this. Now pay attention to an important detail. This hand bone and the first phalange bone are not connected in this rigifhy skeleton. Which means it's possible to move the joint of each of them separately in this part. But for rigifhy to work correctly, you shouldn't separate these joints. If you accidentally separate one of these joints, use the control shortcut to undo this movement. To move this structure correctly, you should create a selection window over these joints. This way, you ensure that both joints of the two bones were selected. Then you can move them with the key. When positioning this first joint, leave it a little inside the hand before the start of the first phalange. And the other two joints can be respectively at the first, third, and second third of each finger. And remember, whenever you move this base joint, you should create a selection window to select the joints of the two bones simultaneously. Pay attention to leave the tip of the last phalange slightly inside the finger volume as well. This way the volume snap will position it at the center of the finger volume. Now just repeat these procedures for the other three fingers. Note that the base of each finger should be close to the wrist. We can also see a hand bone linked to the wrist. This bone can start at the wrist and have the joint at the other end position in the central part of the palm end. In the case of the thumb, we will follow more or less the same logic. The only difference is that it has three bones instead of four counting with the bone that should be inside the palm. But to position it, we will use the same method. To finish, we will need to make sure that the army bones also have a slight angle indicating where the Army will rotate. It's very important that these bones are not completely straight or turned in the wrong direction. We can leave the wrist joint in the center. The elbow joint positions towards the back and the shoulder joint also more towards the center. This way we ensure a slightly angle between the army bone and the 40 arm bone. It's possible that at some point the volume snap may hinder your process when you are no longer using it. Turn it off at the top of the interface. To verify if the arm bone positions are as they should be, just imagine an imaginary straight line between the elbow joint and the wrist joint. Looking from above, the elbow joint should be positioned behind this line. Now you can check to see if everything is in accordance with the positioning guide. With that, we finish position in the bones. In the next class, I will show you one last adjustment we need to make before generating the final rig for the character. Thank you for watching and I see you next time. 11. Adjusting the Bone Rolls: In this class, we are going to make one more adjustment to the rigifying meta rig. This adjustment will be necessary for the fingers of the final rig to rotate in the correct direction When using the animation controls to make this adjustment, I will keep the x ray mode active and I will enter the edit mode of the metallic. The adjustment we are going to make, easing the rotation of the longitudinal axis of the bone. If we look at the rigify bone positioning guide, we will see that each phalange should rotate on the X axis of the bone itself. In addition, each phalanx will rotate towards the Z axis of that specific phalanx. Now let's see how this applies to the rotation of the phalanges. In order to adjust the rotation of the phalanges according to the bony positioning guide, we needed to visualize the axis of each bone. To do this, we will click on the Object Data tab of the Properties Jitter in the Viewport display panel. We will enable the axis option. This option will allow us to see the axis of each of the bones in the skeleton. To adjust the rotation of the longitudinal axis of each bone, we must have the sidebar open by clicking on this arrow in the interface. Here in the item tab, we find a parameter called roll, which specifically regulates the rotation of the longituginal axis of the bone. What we need to do now is select each bone and adjust this parameter so that the X axis aligns with the main rotation axis of the bone that the Z axis points to the bottom of the hand. It's quite possible that most of the bones already have this rotation, more or less correct. But if we adjust and align the rotation of the phalanges bones, the final control will work better. We could adjust the bone row parameter for each of these bones now. But there is a way to cop the adjustment from a bone. We have already adjusted to the other bones. What I need to do is select the other bones first. I will select the other phalanges of this finger. Finally, holding the shift key, I will select the bone that already had the row perimeter adjusted. This makes this the active bone in the selection. Now I will go to the Armature menu. I will click on Bone Row Recalculate row. Here I will click on the Active bone option. These will make the selected bones copy the row value from the active bone. This way they will be perfectly aligned with each other. In fact, if we want, we can repeat the procedure by selecting all the phalanges of all the fingers. Just select. Lastly, one of the bones that already has the row adjusted while holding down the shift key. Now just go to the Armature menu Bone. Row Recalculate Role Active Bone. Then it's worth checking to see if the orientation of the bones is correct. Remember, the X axis is in the rotation axis, and the Z axis should point to where the bone should rotate. If something is wrong, you should adjust the role parameter manually. This parameter is mirrored in the active mode. Once you have adjusted this parameter for one hand, the other hand will be ready as well. Now we just need one more procedure before we can create the rig. For this, we need to enter the pose mode of the skeleton by going to the interaction modes menu. Although the edited mode is the interaction mode used to configure the positioning of the skeleton, Some additional settings of a rig can be done in posing mode. With the skeleton in pose mode, we select the first phlength of each finger of the skeleton. We click on the bony tab of the property agitor. We will open the rig fi type tannal. Here we will change the configuration of the band rotation axis parameter to X manual. This parameter will make the rotation of the finger in the final rig follow the configuration of the bony role we did in edit mode. Now we will do this for each of the other fingers. Note that this configuration is not done on the bone inside of the hand. We will select the first effective plengths of the finger. We will set the bend rotation axis to X manual. In the case of the thumb bone, the adjustment is made on this first bone, which is on the inside of the hand. Unlike the bone row, this parameter is not mirrored to the other side. We should repeat the procedure for the first phalanx of each of the fingers on the other hand. With that, we finish configuring the characters meta rig. Now we can go back to the object data tab of the properties editor. We can turn off the display of the axis. That's it for this class. Thank you for watching, and I see you next time. 12. Generating the Final Rig: In this class, we will generate the final rig for the character. Furthermore, I will provide some additional observations about this process. After creating and configuring the meta rig with the characters proportions, the only thing we need to do effectively is ensure that we have the meta active. Go to the object data in the properties editor in the rig panel. We will click on the Generate rig button. If you have done everything exactly as I showed, you should see the final animation controls generated around your character. But before concluding the class, I want to make some observations. I will use the control Z shorted to undo this command. The first observation I will make is about the neck joint. Some joints in the metari skeleton are connections between two bones. This means that if we select a single joint and move it, these transformations affect the two bones connected to the joint in question. However, the joint between the last dorsal bone and the first neck joint works a little differently. These two joints are not connected, which means we can move each of them separately. However, if we do this, the rig won't work if I leave these two joints disconnected in this way. And click the generate rig button, Rig pi will not create the rig correctly and will display this error message. If we look in the outliner, we will see that the rig object was created. But as it was created with an error, I will delete this object. I will select the meta rig again to show how to fix this problem. For the rig to be created correctly, I will need to position these two joints in the same place. For that, I will enter the addited mode. Now I needed to position these two joints exactly in the same place. Since it's practically impossible to do this by moving these joints freely, I will use a specific command for this. I will start by select the joint that is in the wrong position. Then with the shift key, I will add the joint that is in the correct place to the selection. Now I will right click to open the Context menu. I will click on the Snap submenu. I will click on the Selection to Active Option. This option will move the joint that was selected first to the position of the joints that were selected later. Eventually, these transformations may cause the bone row of one of the bones to be misaligned. If this happens, we can select the bone, we can open the side bar and zero out the row parameter. Now if we select the generate rig button, we will see that the rig will be created correctly. But before concluding the class, I will use the control Z shortcut once again. To make one more observation, what I will do is leave the meta rig skeleton with some bone positioning error before generating the rig. In editing mode, I can, for example, move the top head joint is slightly backward. Now I will click the generate rig button. Since the dish positioning problem is not structural, the rig is created correctly. The only problem is that the head control is not perfectly aligned to my character. This particular error is quite visible. I could use control Z right after generating the rig to make the correction. However, it's possible that we make a small error in position in the meta rig skeleton throughout the process. We only realize this later. If this happens, we can select the meta rig again, we can enter edited modes. We can correct the position of the bone that is wrong. In this case, I will move the top head joint to the correct position. If we look at the rig fi panel now, we will see that the button has changed to regenerate rig. If I click here, we will see that the rig that had already been created will be updated, taking into account the modification I made to the meta rig. If we look in the outliner now, we will see that the generate rig button created a new object called Rig and a new collection called GTS Rig. The object that we will actually use to animate the character is the rig object. Initially, we want to need the meta rig or this collection. But instead of deleting these objects from the scene, I recommend you simply leave them disabled by unchecking the selection and visibility icons in the outliner. This way, if you discover in the future that some rig bone was positioned incorrectly, you can activate the meta rig, make the necessary correction, and generate the rig again as I showed. But this is just for you to have a meta rig backup. If everything is correct from now on, you should only use the rig object. That's it for this class. Thank you for watching until next time. 13. Automatic Weights: In this class, we will start configuring the influence that the rig deformation bones will have on the character using the parent with automatic weights command. To use this command, we can start by selecting the character object Next, while holding down the shift key. We will add the rig we generated with the rig to the selection. Now let's go to the object and we will choose the Armature, the form with automatic weight option. As we can see, the shortcut for the parent menu is control. If we have the selection in this order and use the control shortcut, we will see the parent menu in a floating form. Then I will click on the automatic weights option. If we select only the character now and go to the object data tab in the properties editor, we will see that this command has already created a series of vertex groups corresponding to each of the rigs, deformation bones. If we go to the modifier step, we will see that this command also automatically adds the armature modifier to the module. Now I will make an observation about the order of the characters modifiers, but for that I will select the models rig. I will enter pose mode using the interaction modes menu or the control tab shortcut, which switches between object mode and pose mode. If you have an armature object selected. Now I will select this hand control and I will move it a bit to see the characters deformations. After that I will go back to object mode. As we can see, the parent with automatic weights command has already configured a considerably good weight influence. But one thing we have seen before is that the order in which the modifiers are added to an object can affect how they act on the model. In this case, the object already had the solidify and subdivision modifiers added. However, in this case, if we click on this dotted area of the modifier and move it up on the modifier stack, we will see that the deformation will be a bit smoother this way. Now I will select the rig again. I will enter pose mode. I will press the key to select all the models controls. To reset these changes I made to the characters pose, I will go to the pose menu, Clear transform. I will click on the all option command. We reset any changes you have made to the position of the selected controls. Now I can go back to object mode. It's important to remember that the paint with automatical weights command does a good initial job of configuring the weights. But this configuration is not always perfect. In a future class, we will still make some adjustments to the models weight paint. Thank you for watching and until next time. 14. Using the Rigify Controls Parte 1: In this class, we will see how to use the rigifi controls to move the character. But first, let me make an observation. In the previous class, we used the parent with automatic weights command to configure the bone weight influence on the model. However, as we have already seen, although the parent with automatic weights command does a good initial job, it's not perfect. And usually small manual adjustments with the weight paint tools are necessary after using this command. But for us to make adjustments in the weight painted mode, we needed to work with the animation skeleton. We need to have an understanding of how to manipulate the rigifi controls before making adjustments in the weight painted mode. Therefore, before making these adjustments, we will use our model to learn how to manipulate these controls. But don't be surprised if some parts of the model still have some strange deformations caused by imperfections in the weight paint. Let's start by seeing how to manage the visibility of the character's rig layers. To view the rig layers, let's enter the posing mode of the rig. Let's open the sidebar. Here in the item tab of the side bar, we will find a panel called rig layers. Through this panel, we will be able to enable and disable the visibility of the layers corresponding to the emission controls for each part of the skeleton. But before we proceed, let's turn on x ray. When we are in the posing mode of a rig, x ray allow us to see the skeleton elements inside of the character. With this, we will see the animation controls of the rig in front of the geometry, even if they are inside or behind the model. From now on, I will show you how we can use each of these animation controls to move our character. To do this, I will hide all the layers here in the panel. I believe only the dorsal layer enabled. If I put the rig back in objects and modes and try to transform a part of the skeleton, we will see that the controls will not be manipulated separately. For us to effectively move the character controls, the rig must be imposed, moved with the, we can select each of the controls separately and effectively move the character with the torso layer enabled. We will see the controls for the head, neck, and torso in general. All controls can be moved, rotated, or scaled. But usually the controls are used only for one of these transformations. The head controls, neck controls, and these curved lines in the trunk, for example, are often used for rotation. You can also move scale these controls, but these create the formations in the characters that are usually used only in stylized animations. This layer also has the shoulder controls, which can be rotated to position this part of the body. Additionally, this layer holds this box, which is the central control of the body. The difference between this box and the curved control of the waist is that when we move or rotate the box, all the trunk objects follow these transformations. But if we move or rotate the smaller heap control, the rest of the trunk does not move to rotate each of these controls, we can simply press the R key to rotate the control perpendicular to the viewport. Or we can press the R key twice. When we press the R key twice, the control rotates as if it were looking at the cursor, which can also be useful for positioning the character in some situations. Additionally, we can also use the rotation manipulator from the tool bar. When using this manipulator to position the character, it's very useful to enable the local modes in the transformer orientation menu. This way the rotation icon rotates along with the control. These allow us to have a lot of control over which axis is being rotated at any given time. But it's important to remember to switch back to the global option in the transformer orientation menu when it's more convenient. If you look here in the panel now, we will see that below the torsal layer button, there is a button called trick. Additionally, we can see other trick type layers for the arms and legs. These are adjustment layers and enables separate controls for these parts of the body. These controls are often used to create stylized deformations in characters, such as making a body part more stretched or curved. But these controls are generally used only in very specific situations. In general, it's simpler to leave these layers disabled when working on a character. But before hiding these layers, I will reset the position of these controls. If after testing how to use the controls you want to return them to their initial position, you can press the a shortcut key to select all of them. Go to the pose menu, clear transform, and click all to reset the position, rotation and scale of all selected controls. Alternatively, you could use the short cuts out to reset the position, out to reset the rotation out to reset the scale. Now I will disable the trick type layers in the panel. In the next class, I will continue using this file to show you how to use the rigo file controls. Thank you for watching, and I see you next time. 15. Using the Rigify Controls Part 2: In this class, we will see how to manipulate the arm controls in di phi. I will continue from where I left in the previous lesson. Now I will start by enabling the finger layers. This layer, we will enable these controls on each finger. If we take one of these controls and rotate it, we will see that the entire finger will rotate from the base. If we scale the control using the shortcut, we will see that the middle phalanx and the finger tip phalanx will bend. We can even select all finger controls and press the S key to scale them all at once. We just need to be aware of the following. To manipulate more than one animation control simultaneously. It's ideal to go to the transform, a pivot point menu, and activate the individual origins mode. If we have the median point option active, we will see that the fingers will scale from a point in the center of the selection, which will cause a strange result. Therefore, make sure to leave the individual origins option active. This way the control for each finger will rotate from its own origin. In addition to the controls, the fingers layer has this control on the inside of the hand. This control is used to deform the palm of the hand through rotation. The fingers detail layer enables some circular controls on each phalanx. These controls can be used to rotate each phalanx independently. These controls can be used to make some fine adjustments after creating the hand pose with the main controls. If we observe the panel, we will see that each character's limb has two types of options, IK and FK. I will enable the Arm, K, and ArmfK buttons for both sides. The Arm buttons refer to the left side, the RR buttons refer to the right side. The terms IK and FK refer to two different ways of controlling articulated limbs. The first thing we needed to understand is that although we can enable the visualization of both types of controls simultaneously in the viewport, only one of them will work at a time. We can define whether the K mode or the FK mode is active separately for each limb. I will start by showing how to define which of the two modes is active using the left arm as an example. For this, I can select any of the controls of this R. Then I will open the rig main property spaniel. If we have a control of one of the limbs selected, we will see the KK value here. When this value is zero, the limb in question will be controlled by the K mode. If the value is one, the limb will be controlled by the K mode. I will start by setting the parameter to zero to begin showing how the IK mode works. Now I will deactivate the FK mode button for the left arm to leave only the controls of the K mode active. When the IK mode is active. The positioning of the limb is mainly defined by the control at the end. In the keys of the arm, we can select the dicontrol around the palm of the hand. We can move and rotate this control. With this, we can put the arm in practically any position. The only thing we can't define with this control is the rotation of the elbow. When we are using the K mode of the rigifhi. The rotation of the elbow is defined by the other control. Simply select it and rotate the control to determine where the elbow will point. Now let's see how to use the K mode. For this, I will enable the visualization of the ArmlKbton. With this, these controls appear in the viewport, but they are not active yet. If I select one of these controls and rotate, we will see that nothing happens to the arm. To switch the control mode of this army from K to FK, we must have any of the arm controls active in the rig, main property spannel. We will set the value of the IKFK parameter to one. Note that this value is individual for each arm of the character. Changing the left army from K to FK does not change the right arm as well. With this change, we can see that the army will no longer follow the controls of the IK mode. If we move them, I will even disable the Ark button in the panel. When the K mode is active. The limb in question is controlled by controls that active only on the rotation of the limb parts. Unlike the K mode, where the positioning of the limbs is predominantly controlled by the position of the end control. In the case of the arm, the FK mode leaves the three controls active, one for the arm, one for the farm, and one for the hand. We just need to be careful with the fore arm control. Initially, this control can be rotated freely, but in real life, our fore arm only rotates in one direction. To show how we can prevent the forearm from rotating on the wrong axis, I will select all the arm controls. I will use the out R shot cut to reset the rotation. Now I will select the fore arm control. I will open the transform panel in the side bar. As we have seen, we can change the transformation values for each axis through the spaniel. But as we can see, the only axis that corresponds to the natural rotation of the four army is the X axis. If we rotated this control on the Y axis, on the Z axis, the Army will look like it's broken. One thing I recommend you do with the FK controls for the four arms is to activate lock for the Y and Z X. This way this Xs will be locked and the control will only rotate on the X Xs. Whenever I create a rig with rig hi, I do this for the FK controls of both four arms of the model. To finish, I will mention one more difference between the FK mode and the IK mode. For this, I will set the right arm to K modes and the left side to FK modes. Now if I select the central control of the trunk and start moving it, we will see that the arm that is set to FK mode follows the movement of the trunk, while the arm that is in K mode keeps the hand in the same place. Each of these control modes has its advantages and the advantages. In general, animators tend to use the FK mode whenever they are animating scenes where the characters arms are moving freely. Since K mode animation is donly through rotation, the movement usually appear smoother with this type of control. But when the character has hands resting or fixed at some point, the K mode is usually used. In the next class, we will see how to use the controls for the leg in the Rigid. Thank you for watching and see you next time. 16. Using the Rigify Controls Parte 3: In this class, we will see how to manipulate the Lega controls in Rigifhi. As we can see in the Rigifhi layers panel, the legs in Rigifhi also have the IK and FK options we saw in the previous class. For this demonstration, I will leave the leg L K layer active and the leg LK layer inactive. For the right leg, I will do the opposite. I will leave the leg RFK layer active. I will deactivate the leg RK layer. Similarly to the arms. The fact that the controls are visible in the viewport doesn't mean they are active by the foe. The active controls for the legs are the controls of the K modes. If I move the controls of the left leg, now we will see that they are working. But the controls that I left enables for the right leg are not working. To activate them, I will select any of the controls. I will go to the rig main property spaniel. Here I will set the value of the K K parameter to one. This way the rig of the right leg will be controlled by the FK mode controls. The difference between the IK and FK Mode in the leg is the same as in the arms with the FK Mode. Each part of the leg is positioned by the rotation of the corresponding control. With the K mode, the leg is positioned with the movement of this main control located at the base of the foot. Furthermore, the rotation of the knee is defined by the rotation of this other control similar to the rotation of the elbow in the arms, just like in the arms. If we move the central control of the character, we can see that the leg configured with the FK mode follows the character, while the leg with the K mode keeps the foot stationary in the same place. In the case of the legs, it's considerably important for the feet to remain stationary when remove the trunk, since the feet in general are supported on the ground. This is a dynamic that is desired almost always. In the case of the legs, it's most common that we always leave these controls in K mode. Now to finish, I will show you how to manipulate the controls of the feet in K mode. As we have seen, this larger main control can be used to move and rotate the foot. But when the feet are resting on the ground, we can use other controls to rotate parts of the foot. I will use the out R shortcut to reset the rotation, and the out G shortcut to reset the position of the control. Now I will select this control on the back of the foot. This control should be rotated only on the X axis. If you want, you can even lock the rotation of the other axis of this control so that they are not accidentally rotated. When we rotate this control forward, the tip of the foot remains supported and the foot rotates from the center. We rotate backwards, the foot rotates from the heel. The other two controls are less important, but can also be used for obciliary rotation of the center of the foot and the tip of the foot. With this, we finish seeing how the controls of the legs work. To finish, I will activate the root control. This is the control where all the other controls are linked directly or indirectly. If we move this control, all the controls will move with it. In general, we use this control only to define the initial position of the character in the animation. And then we deactivated with this, we finish seeing how to use the rigo Fi controls. I hope that with this you can already create custom positions for your character. If you want to reset your character's position, you can enable the visualization of all the controls you have manipulated. Select all the controls with the a shortcut key. Go to the Pose menu, Click on Clear Transform and click on All. This way the whole character will return to the initial pause. That's it for this class. Thank you for watching and until next time. 17. Weight Paint Adjustments: In this lesson, we will see how to correct any imperfections in the weight painting mode of the model left by the parent with automatic weights command. For this, we will select the character object. We will enter the weight painting mode in the interactions mode when we have a geometry selected. We can also use the control tab shortcut to open the interactions mode menu in the circular format. Here I can choose any interaction mode like object mode. I can use the control tab, shortcut again and enter the weight paint mode through this path. When you are using weight paint mode, it might be a good idea to disable the subdivision modifier in the modifier tab. This will make the process lighter in the viewport. Another important node is to make sure the overlays button is active. Otherwise you won't be able to see the weight influence map on the model. If we open the Viewport Overlays menu, we can also enable the wire framing visualization over the model. This configuration is a matter of preference and it's not mandatory. Another important observation is to ensure that the face and vertex selection masks are disabled in these buttons. If any of these two options are active, the tools in weight paint mode will only work on vertexes or faces that are active in the edit mode. In general, it's a good idea to leave these options disabled. Another function we should enable when working with the weight paint mode is the autonormalized option found in the options menu. As we have seen, the weight paint process involves adjusting the influence values that a particular vertex group has on certain vertices. One way to select these vertex groups is by going to the object data tab and choosing the desired group in the vertex groups panel. However, I standard rig has numerous groups and it's quite difficult and counter intuitive to select them. Through this list, I will show you another way to select the vertex groups to work on the weight paint process. For this method, I'm going to show I need to go back to object mode. I will need to select the rig, but in addition to selecting the rig, I will need to enable the display of the rigs deformation bones. The deformation bones are the bones that effectively act on the characters vertex groups. We can enable the display of the deformation bones using the rigs layer system in the object data tab of the property Gor. The layer system is in the skelet companion of this tab. Here I need to make an observation. If you are using a blender version from the 3.6 series or earlier, you will see the old version of the layer management system with this Dots interface. In this interface, each dot corresponded to a rig layer. The layer we need to enable is this third one from back to front. But to enable its display without disabling the others, I will click on it with the shift key pressed. If I click on it without the shift key pressed, I disable the others. I will press control Z and click on it with the shift key pressed. If I enable x ray mode, now we will be able to see a series of bones inside the character. These bones are the bones that effectively act on the vertex groups. If we leave them enabled, we can select them in the weight painting mode using the methadame. Going to show if you are using version 3.6 or an earlier version activated this layer. If you are using version four or a later version, you will see that the layer management system interface has been replaced by a panel called Bone Collection. In this new system can enable and disable the display of each rigs layer or collection by clicking on this icon next to the collection name. If you created your rig in an earlier version of Blender and opened your file in version four or later, the layer you should enable to view the deformation bones is layer 30. If you have already generated the rig file rig in blender four or later, you will see that the collections already have a more organized naming structure. In this case just activates the collection called death at the bottom of the panel. After enabling the display of the deformation bones, we will keep the rig selected. We will add the character to the selection with the shift key pressed. Now we can enter weight paint modes so that we can see the deformation bones inside the model. I will enable x ray mode when we are in weight painted mode, but we also have a rig in the selection, we can select rig objects. The shortcuts to select a bone or a rig control up to Blender 3.6 control and click If you are using Blender four or later, the shortcut is out. And click. This way I can select any control or deformation bone that is visible. If I select an animation control, I can even move it normally. In the case of this head control, for example, I can press the R key to rotate the control. An observation is that when we have a rig object selected that does not affect any vertex group, such as animation controls, the models colors turns pink as you can see. But then using this method, we can select the controls. Even when we are in weight painting mode of the model, we can test the position to see if the weight painting is working. If it's not, we can make the necessary corrections. If we select the deformation bone with control and click up to version 3.6 or with out and click from version four, we can see the weight painting of the vertex group, of the respective bone. In the case of the deformation bone of the head for example, we can see that it's not influencing the nose as it should. In this case, I will do the following. I will select the head control. I will use the out R shortcut to reset the bones rotation. I will select the head deformation bone again, I will use the weight paint tools to paint this bone. If I start painting normally with the drop brush, we will see the vertex being painted wherever I passed the brush. But if I rotate the thru de Vial, we will see that the brush is not painting on the other side of the model. If we want the brush to paint through the model, we need to do the following. In the brush panel, I will disable the front face only option. But if I do a test now, we will see that this alone is not enough. Additionally, I need to go to the fall off panel and change the fall off shape setting from sphere to projected. Also, make sure the front face fall off option is not enabled with these settings. Anything you paint on one side, we'll go through the geometry and paint on the opposite side as well. If I test the rotation of the head, now we will see that the nose is already correctly inferenced by this vertex group. Now all you need to do is move the controls of your character to see if you encounter any issues with the weight paint configuration. As we can see initially, the paint with automatic weights command does a good job, especially on slim characters like this one. But if you need to make any corrections, is a good idea to activate symmetry for the x axis by clicking on this button. This way, anything you configure on one side will be mirrored to the other side. If I select the deformation bone and make a painting adjustment, the deformation bone on the other side will undergo the equivalent adjustment. Now it's a matter of selecting the controls and testing to see if the deformations are good. In the case of the leg, I'm seeing a detail that could have been better. I could have inserted a loop in the model exactly at the knee joint. This would make the deformation in this region more controlled, but we can take the opportunity to see that there is no problem in doing this. Now if we go into editing mode, we can use the loop cut to with the controller shortcut to insert a new loop at the height of each knee. If I go back to eight painted mode, we will see that these new virtues are automatically configured. Looking at the result of this deformation, I think I can make the influence in this area a little smoother. With the shin deformation bone selected, I will activate the blur tool. I will go over this region. Since symmetry for the x axis is active, these adjustments will already be reflected on the other side as well. Now it's a matter of continuing to test to see if the deformations are good and making the necessary adjustments. With the tools of the weight in mode, remember that you can select all the controls and use the out R shortcut to reset the rotation, the G shortcut to reset the position, and the out A shortcut tha set the scale of the controls. This way you ensure that the character returns to the original position. At the end of the process, you can return to object mode and disable the display of the layer or collection of the formation bones. That's it for this lesson. Thank you for watching and until next time. 18. Parenting Objects to Bones: In this class, we will see how we can parent objects that will not deform to bones of the rig. In the case of our character, the objects that will not deform but should follow a rig bone are the hair objects and the dental arches. In this case, all these objects should follow the deformation bone of the head. To perform this procedure, I will start by enabling the visualization of these objects in the outliner to parent **** to a rig bone. We will select the object and the bone to which the object will be parented. But since I want to parent the objects to one of the rigs deformation bones, I need to enable the display of the layer or collection of the deformation bones. Up to version 3.6 this is done by adding this layer to the active layers by clicking on these little dots with the shaped key pressed. From version four onwards, we enable the display of the deformation bone collection by activating the death collection in the bone collection spanel. If we enable the x ray, we will see that the deformation bones are visible inside the model. Now we should start by selecting the object we want to parent. I will start by selecting the hair strands. With the shift key pressed, I will add the rig to the selection. But for the commander to know which bone I want to parent the object to, I will enter pose mode. I will click on the head deformation bone. Now I can go to the Pose menu, Click on Parents and click on Bone. This way, the selected object will be parented to the active bone in the armature. If I select the head control and rotate with the R key, we can see that the object is already correctly following the movement. Now I will go back to object mode. I will select the base hair object. I will add the rig to the selection. I will enter pose mode again, select the deformation bone. Go to the pose menu, Parent bone. In fact, we don't even need to exit pose mode to switch the object selected in the object to mode. If we go to the outer liner and click on the teeth object, the teeth object will be selected. We can now parent it to the active bone. Now we can go back to object mode and save the scene. Thank you for watching until next time. 19. Transfer Weights From Body to Clothes: In this class we will see how to transfer the weight paint configuration we did on the character's body to the clothes. These procedures I'm going to show work whenever the object wants to transfer the already painted weight to has shapes very similar to the original object. If the target object has a more different shape like loser or different shaped clothes, this technique may not work. To start, I will activate the visibility of the shirt, pants, and shoes, objects in the outliner. Since I won't need the rigs deformation layer or collection, I can hide this layer or collection if I want. Before performing the weight paint transfer procedure, we needed to select the object for each piece of clothing. We need to apply the mirror modifier so that it's effectively incorporated into the object. Additionally, it's very important that during the procedure we deactivate any other modifiers that the object may have. I will do this for all the clothes. I will apply the mirror modifier for the Pens object. I will deactivate the subdivision modifier. I will repeat the procedure for the shoes. Applying the mirror modifier, I will disable the display of the subdivision and solidify modifiers. Now I will start the weight paint transfer process. What we need to do is start by selecting the object that already has the configured weight paint. In this case, I will start by selecting the character next. While holding down the shift key, I will add the target object to the selection. In this case, I can start with the shirt. With the shirt active, I will activate Weight Paint mode. I will go to the Weights menu. I will click on the Transfer Weights command. Immediately after I click on the command, I will open the Transfer mesh data panel down here. Here we will configure three parameters. In the vertex mapping menu, we will select the nearest phase interpolated option in the ray radius parameter. We will enter the value five. In the source layer selection menu, we will choose the binding option. The next step is to add the armature modifier to the object. In the object field of the modifier, we will select the rig object, which correspond to the rig for which we want the weight paint to be configured. To finish, we will move the armature modifier to the top of the modifier stack. With that, the process is ready. Now we can re enable the visibility of the modifiers for this object. If you go to the object mode, select the rig, interpose mode, and make some changes to the modus pose. We will see that the clothing is already configured with the weight paint and is the forming along with the character. Now I will repeat exactly the same procedure for the other objects. I will start by selecting the character's body. Add the pen to the selection while holding down the shift key. A weight paint mode. Go to the Weights menu and click on Transfer Weights. Since I had already configured this panel previously, Blender saved the settings. As we can see, the panel is already configured with the necessary parameters. Then we can add the armature modifier to the object, and we can choose the rig object in the object field. Now we just need to move the modifier up to the modifier stack and enable the display of the subdivision modifier. Now I will go back to object mode, select the rig, interpose mode, and test the movement to see if everything is working. As we can see, the knee spoking through the Pens object a bit. This may be happening because I added an additional segment to the character's knee that I didn't add to the Pens object. Furthermore, the character object does not have the subdivision modifier active. I can go back to object mode and enable the subdivision modifier for the character. Now I can select the Pen Object, Enter Edited mode, and add a segment at the height of each knee using the control or shot cut for the loop cut two. As we can see, the deformation is still not perfect. I can go into the weight paint mode of this object and select the vertex groups to make a weight paint adjustment. We could enable the deformation layer or collections as we did before, but I will show another way to select vertex groups. If you are using blender version four or later, you can position the cursor over an area of the model and use the control shift X shortcut to open a menule like this. If you are using a version prior to four, the shortcut is shift and the right mouse button. When you position the cursor over an area and use these shortcuts. Blender shows a menu with all the vertex groups influencing the vertexes in that region. It may be a little less intuitive to select this way, but in many cases, a bit of trier and error can solve it. In this case, I will select the shin bone. I will activate the blur tool, I will activate the symmetry button. I will brush over the region. Now I can use again the shortcut control. Shift X for versions above four, and shift right click for versions before four. And I will select the tight deformation bone. I will continue brushing, I will keep trying to adjust until the deformation looks reasonable. Now I will go back to object mode, select the rig and test the pose a bit more. When I think everything is fine, I can go to the pose menu, Clear transform all, and to finish, I can repeat the procedures for the shoe object. I will select the character, add the shoes to the selection. Enter weight, painted mode. Use the transfer weights command. Add the armature modifier, choose rig. Move the modifier up and enable the other modifiers. And with that, we finish the weight paint transfer from the body object to the clothing objects. If you want, you can enter the exposed mode and do some tests to see if everything is working correctly. Eventually, some adjustments may be needed in weight painting mode. But overall, these techniques works very well for tight fitting clothes. Thank you for watching and until next time.